Through photometric observations of core collapse supernovae by the ROTSE-III experiment, I examine the ability to use these objects as distance probes to their host galaxies and subsequently determine the expansion of the local universe. For the DESI experiment, I work to develop spectroscopic simulations and a spectroscopic reduction pipeline to be used for data quality assessment. Additionally, I examine the effects of observing conditions on redshift measurements and the ability to extract cosmological parameters
